[jinushaun]

The problem is that a university education has become a necessity in the workplace when it really shouldn't. Most jobs don't need a university education and you don't need a college degree to tell you that you are smart. (If you believe that a college education is what you make of it, then a college education doesn't really prepare you for anything and smart motivated people would succeed without college anyway.) As a result, the demand for a university education outpaces supply. All this combines with the proliferation of student loans to make a university education much more attainable--but much more expensive--than previously in history.

To lower cost we need to lower demand. We need to bring back trade schools and raise their importance. We need to give youths an option of a good job and a good wage without having to go to college. Look at Germany and their Berufsschulen. An electrician is just an important and valuable as an electrical engineer. Hell, most of the IT industry are vocational jobs that shouldn't require a college degree. How many people actually do computer science at work? How many people here on HN learned to program on their own and picked up best practices on the job?

[rbehrends]

With respect to Germany's vocational schools, note that Germany subsidizes all forms of tertiary education heavily, not just their vocational schools. Attending a university in Germany costs you at most a few hundred EUR per semester (and is free aside from administrative fees in several German states). Simply put, a highly skilled labor force is considered enough of a public good in Germany that the government is willing to invest in it (on top of accessible tertiary education being nice to have). And yes, there's actually high demand for computer scientists with a university degree in Germany, too.

Subsidizing tertiary education is in fact fairly typical in Europe; expensive college degrees are largely an American/English thing. For example, here in Scotland, there have been no tuition fees for Scottish students (as well as for non-British EU students) since the Graduate Endowment Abolition (Scotland) Bill. As another example, ETH Zürich charges, I think, around 600 CHF/semester in fees. Both the University of Edinburgh and ETHZ rank among the top 25 universities worldwide, so it's not as though quality is being sacrificed in the process.

[Quizzal]

Worse yet, it's a tiered system where to get the plum jobs, you have to graduate from Ivy/Stanford/MIT. But the reality is that a passionate hard working kid from UCLA or UTexas is no less qualified to fill the same role as a similarly educated one from Princeton. Employers are simply lazy, and rather than truly vet candidates for talent, they just assume that if the candidate has an Ivy on the resume, that's good enough.

[rdouble]

Trade schools are not a panacea. The bigger picture is the economy sucks and there aren't enough jobs, tradespeople included. No amount of education reform is going to fix the jobs problem.